The present invention relates to a printer control apparatus and method, and in particular to setting, selection and update processing of printing data of an ink jet printer control apparatus allowing change of printing contents and a method for controlling it.
With the advance of factory automation in manufacturing plants, use of ink jet printers in printing of information (such as manufacturing date, time or manufacturing lot number) onto products handled on production lines is now widespread. Since printing information can be changed diversely by means of electrical signals in ink jet printers, ink jet printers can be advantageously used as information printers of production lines for multikind and small quantity production.
In addition, printing control apparatuses as disclosed in JP-A-60-217178 and JP-A-61-237654 have been proposed in order to facilitate frequent change of printing information.
In order to conduct printing on a wide variety of products on one line, each of these printing control apparatuses has a plurality of printing information respectively associated with kinds of products and performs printing with the information associated with the kind of the product in accordance with the information.
When setting respective peculiar printing information such as manufacturing date, time or manufacturing lot number with respect to a plurality of products and selecting and using one of the printing information, however, these conventional printing control apparatuses lack consideration for keeping the printing information at the optimum state to provide for the time when information including printing information for other products which are not being used for printing are used the next time. If the product on the line is changed over, it is difficult to immediately use the printing information associated with the product after changeover.